Legal Rules, Text and Ontologies Over Time by Monica Palmirani, Tommaso Ognibene and Luca Cervone.
Abstract:
The current paper presents the “Fill the gap” project that aims to design a set of XML standards for modelling legal documents in the Semantic Web over time. The goal of the project is to design an information system using XML standards able to store in an XML-native database legal resources and legal rules in an integrated way for supporting legal knowledge engineers and end-users (e.g., public administrative officers, judges, citizens).
It was refreshing to read:
The law changes over time and consequently change the rules and the ontological classes (e.g., the definition of EU citizenship changed in 2004 with the annexation of 10 new member states in the European Community). It is also fundamental to assign dates to the ontology and to the rules, , based on an analytical approach, to the text, and analyze the relationships among sets of dates. The semantic web cake recommends that content, metadata should be modelled and represented in separate and clean layers. This recommendation is not widely followed from too many XML schemas, including those in the legal domain. The layers of content and rules are often confused to pursue a short annotation syntax, or procedural performance parameters or simply because a neat analysis of the semantic and abstract components is missing.
Not being mindful of time, of the effective date of changes to laws, the dates of events/transactions, can be hazardous to your pocketbook and/or your freedom!
Does your topic map account for time or does it exist in an eternal “now?” like the WWW?
I first saw this at Legal Informatics.
[…] paper I mentioned on yesterday: Legal Rules, Text and Ontologies Over Time [The eternal "now?"] is part of these […]
Pingback by Proceedings of the RuleML2012@ECAI Challenge « Another Word For It — September 4, 2012 @ 2:33 pm